And the tiny queen pulled off the mended shoe, and cried: "Here, you silly boy! Take this and run to the palace. Once there, you need touch but a tendril with this magic shoe, and the vine will wither and disappear, and the crown and kingdom will be yours. I wish you joy of both. Good-bye! You will learn contentment yet, poor Jim, I hope," she added, as he ran out of hearing, with the precious little shoe in his hand. Leaving his poor mother behind, for he had forgotten all about her during these days, Jim set off for the palace. It was a long, hard journey, on account of the melon-vines, that not only blocked the road, but even chased him. Many a narrow escape had he from being crushed to death in the embrace of some young tendril that would shoot out, wriggling and writhing toward him like a great green serpent. At length, he arrived at the palace gate, which in old times was marble, but now was only a hole that had been cut through a melon. "Halt! Who goes there!" shouted a sentinel, thrusting his spear in front of Jim's panting breast. "It's only Nimble Jim, the Cobbler. I want to see the king," said the boy. "Be off, you fellow!" shouted the sentry. "Our noble king don't hob-nob with cobblers! Be off, I say, or----" And he shook his spear at our hero ominously. "Hold, there!" shouted the king himself, straining out of a window to look between the melon-leaves. "Hold, I say! What do you want, young cobbler?" "I want your crown and kingdom, sire," boldly answered Jim. "I've heard of the new law, and I'll stop the melon-vine." "Let him pass, guards," shouted the king; "and send him hither." A little page dressed in black led Jim to the throne-room. The king and his court no longer blazed in gold and jewels. Black covered everybody and everything, even the golden throne itself, and grief and dismay were on all faces. Then said the king, in a hollow tone: "What know you of this vine? Speak!" And Jim, tremblingly, told the whole story. "Wicked boy!" groaned the king. "You well deserve punishment for the ruin you have brought on the land. But I have passed my royal word, and you shall try to destroy the vine. If you succeed, bad as you are, you then will be the king and I the cobbler. But if you fail, you shall be put where you shall have nothing but melons to eat for the rest of your days. Guards, take him away!" That night, before the king and queen and all the assembled court, when the moon was fairly risen, Nimble Jim touched with the toe of the magic shoe the end of a tendril that was running rapidly up a tower. In an instant, every vestige of the vine vanished throughout all the palace grounds; and in the morning the people all over the country shouted for joy and cried with one voice: "Let us all go up to the coronation, for to-day we have a new king who has delivered us from the horrible vine."